Going Mobile? Choose Drupal

Mobile can’t be ignored. This technology axiom is too well known to be repeated. But it is worth remembering that it has been more than 2 years since mobile overtook PCs in web access. The question then boils down to what technology do you use to lap up the mobile advantage. One of the names that obviously strikes us would be Drupal. But why Drupal for mobile?

When you want to go mobile, you already have(if you don’t, you must) 3 objectives in your mind:

• To minimize the effort, time and money to mobilize your site

• To deepen engagement with native app by managing mobile and desktop content in one place and

• To tailor the mobile experience

Back in the old days, when you wanted to mobilize your site, you had to create a completely separate site and hand select content which required separate layouts and styles. For specific devices of course, you needed to create individual styles and layouts.

It is here that Drupal offers you the advantage of being Responsive from the word go. Well, for those of you who ask what responsive means, it basically means that instead of having two sites(one for desktop and another for mobile) with all their additional formatting and maintenance headaches, you create one theme that would detect the device viewing and respond by redrawing the site for that device. Now, that would bring about the following :

• One article = one URL (Basically one codebase for the website)

• Update content just once

• Maintain just a single platform

Got it folks? It needs to be pointed out that responsive also additionally means flexible grids, adaptive widgets, media queries etc. How does Drupal fare here?  Drupal has several base themes(Omega, Adaptive, Zen) that support responsive layer out of the box. The Omega theme, in particular has been one of the most powerful and responsive themes for Drupal. It is fully HTML5 compatible, uses some elements of CSS3, is based on the 960 grid and provides many layouts directly in the Drupal interface.  It also plays well with service module, REST and JSON.

All of us know that drupal core is modular, having a system of hooks and callbacks, accessed internally through an API. It is this design that allows modules and themes contributed by  third-parties to extend or override Drupal's default behaviors without changing Drupal core's code.

Though there are security and usability issues with Drupal, these issues are found with other Content Management systems as well. It would be safe to assume that they’d be fixed in the near future and Drupal’s reputation of the core never being hacked would stand.